In For the Kill

by Shannon McKenna

  Sam’s mouth opened and closed. Nothing came out.

  “You get shot a lot, don’t you?” Rachel’s voice was disapproving. “Mama says it’s a bad habit. The worst habit a boyfriend can have. Worse than smoking.”

  Hysterical laughter burst out his nose. “You could say that.”

  “You’re no good to Sveti if you get shot. Learn to duck, okay?”

  “That’s the plan,” he assured her.

  “Okay, then. My work here is done.” Rachel flounced toward the door, then turned. “Don’t touch her dinner, or I’ll tell Mama.”

  Air whooshed out of him when the door shut. He thudded down onto the couch. She’d sneaked in and sat with him in the ICU when he was unconscious? God, what a waste. If only he’d woken up in time and busted her. What he could have accomplished, with months to ruthlessly play the convalescing invalid pity card. He would’ve had her nailed to the wall by now. He’d have closed the deal long before this seductive Illuxit bullshit ever came onto the horizon.

  But what-ifs were a waste of time.

  He stripped off his shirt and climbed into the bed wearing just his jeans, curling his body around hers. Her heartbeat felt rapid and hectic, as if she were dreaming. God knows about what. Something scary.

  He wished he could crawl into her dreams and do battle with the monsters there. She deserved a champion, even inside her mind. Hell, especially inside her mind. She’d stood guard while he was in extremity. He could do the same. He lay wide-eyed in the darkness. Battle ready.

  It happened a couple hours into his watch. Sveti exploded into movement, wailing something in Ukrainian. Good thing Rachel had given him a heads-up, because it would have scared the living shit out of him otherwise. He parried her blows and carefully rolled on top of her, containing her body without crushing it. She thrashed and yelled.

  “Sveti, Sveti, Sveti,” he crooned, batting her clawed fingers away from his eyes. “Sveti, it’s me. It’s Sam.”

  Slowly, her flailing ceased, easing down to a violent tremor. “Sam?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.” He dared, finally, to lift himself, reach to flip on a lamp. “You’re safe, baby.”

  “Sam? Oh, God, I’m so sorry. Did I hit you?”

  “Nah,” he lied. “Not very much. Little kitten paws.” Actually, his face smarted from the blows that had landed, but even a whack on the face from Sveti was sexually stimulating. He was really that fucked up.

  He pulled her close, but she wrenched away and huddled herself into a knot. Hugging her knees, hiding her face. He’d gotten familiar with that pose by now. “Nightmare?” he asked gently. “Tell me about it.”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, actually, I do,” he said. “Come on. Tell me.”

  He waited, stroking her back. Minutes went by. Her heart rate had eased off. He lifted her hair, exposing her face. “Tell me,” he urged.

  She sighed, surrendering. “From when I was taken, years ago. One of our guards, Yuri. He was foul. He stank, and he was cruel, and violent, and he . . . well. Anyway . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  Sam finally prompted her. “He sexually abused you?”

  She shook her head. “He wanted to. He was working up to it. But the woman who watched us, Marina . . . she held him back. There had been this other girl, back in Kiev. She’d been raped by the men who had kidnapped her. She got some disease, maybe hepatitis. She had night sweats, fevers. Anyhow, when people came to test us, they found that Aleksandra’s organs were no longer viable. Big shake-up. Heads rolled.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I woke up, and she was gone.”

  “I’m so sorry, baby,” he said. “That’s awful.”

  She nodded. “That’s the only reason he didn’t have sex with me,” she said. “Marina didn’t trust him not to be HIV positive, or whatever else. But he compensated by beating me. That excited him, too.”

  He wound his arms around her again and squeezed her against himself. There wasn’t anything to say that wasn’t stupid or vapid.

  “Aleksandra was the one who first explained sex to me.” Her voice was bleak. “That was my introduction to it. Straight from the mouth of a twelve-year-old girl who’d been kidnapped and gang-raped.”

  Sam hid his face against her hair.

  “See what my problem is? I’m as fucked up as you might expect, considering what happened to me. You don’t want to get near it, Sam.”

  “I’ll decide that for myself, thanks.”

  She muttered something under her breath in Ukrainian.

  “What?” he said. “What was that? Translation, please.”

  “You’re going to destroy me,” she said, turning to climb up onto his body. “You might as well at least make it worth my while.”

  He grabbed her hands as she reached to unfasten his fly. “No.”

  She froze, astonished. “What? Why not?”

  It was almost impossible to articulate the weird impulse, which flew in the face of everything his body screamed for. But this imperative came from someplace even deeper. “You’re just distracting yourself from the way you feel,” he blurted. “Don’t do that. It’s a dead end.”

  “Dead end?” She gaped at him. “Sex with you is an end in itself!”

  “Not this time,” he said.

  “What’s wrong with just changing the subject? I thought that was good! Change the bad channel! That’s what they all tell me to do!”

  He wrapped his hands around the deep curve of her waist. Stroking, soothing. “Running away isn’t good,” he said. “You have to stay with it. Not skitter away like a marble in a pinball machine.”

  She tried to dismount, but he tightened his fingers on her waist. “Uh-uh,” he murmured. “You’re not going anywhere. Stay with it.”

  “So you’re a therapist now?” she snapped. “You weren’t there with me, Sam! You would not want to stay with what’s in my head!”

  “I’m sure that I wouldn’t, but relax. I’m trying to be real with you, and I’m putting myself way out there, so don’t punish me for it.”

  She shook her head, baffled. “What do you want, then? For me to dwell on it? And work myself into a state? That’s stupid!”

  “Tell me about the dream,” he said stubbornly. “Tell me all of it.”

  Her face contracted. She pressed her fists against her eyes. “Oh, God, whatever,” she said. “If you must know. I dream that I’m making love to you. And you turn into Yuri. Suddenly, it’s Yuri on top of me.”

  He recoiled, instinctively. “Oh, shit. That’s bad.”

  “Yeah, it is. It’s awful. Every goddamn time.”

  “You’ve had this dream before?” He was appalled.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Ever since I started having sexual fantasies about you, Sam. Which is to say, the very first day I met you.”

  He jerked up onto his elbows. “Me? Why? What did I do? What, you think that I’m a—”

  “Not at all.” Her swift smile flashed. “Relax. You’re not like Yuri at all. But I became a sexually aware person in that filthy hole, and there was Yuri, the whole time, leering at me while it happened. It marked me. I can’t forget feeling helpless and vulnerable. A thing to be used. I felt so naked. I had nothing but a dirty oversized T-shirt to wear.”

  “But what do I have to do with that?” he demanded.

  She hugged her knees, propped her chin on her arms, and pondered the question. “You make me feel vulnerable,” she said.

  “But I would never hurt you!”

  “I know that.” She put a soothing hand on his chest. “You are nothing at all like him. You’re wonderful. But when I feel naked and vulnerable, Yuri comes to me. And nothing makes me feel more naked and vulnerable than you. It’s very strange. Very fucked up. I’m sorry. And I have no idea if it will ever get any better. The closer I am to you, the worse it gets. Nightmares. Stress flashbacks, too. After what happened in Bruno’s office
two years ago, I saw Yuri everywhere. On the metro, on the bus, in the supermarket, in the library. He haunted me.”

  “Oh, Christ.” He felt helpless. “Is that why you blew me off?”

  She bit her lip and nodded.

  “I wish I’d known,” he said.

  Sveti shrugged. “I didn’t want to advertise my mental health issues to the world. Particularly not to the guy I had a huge crush on.”

  He stared at her slender hand, which was making delicate, stimulating circles on his chest. “Do you want me to go away?”

  She jerked, as if he had stuck her with a pin. “God, no! I want you here! I want you all over me!”

  “Ah. Okay.” He flopped back onto his back and gazed up at the ceiling, bemused. “Wow. How did we get here, to this weird place?”

  “It’s all your fault, Sam,” she snapped. “I was just trying to seduce you. But you refuse me. You insist on an uncomfortable conversation about my feelings and how I shouldn’t avoid them. You manipulate me into telling you things that hurt your feelings and freak you out.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Does my ass look fat in these jeans?”

  Her lips twitched, and she ran a teasing finger over the bulge in the front of his jeans. “Will you sulk if I tell you the truth? Because those jeans don’t fit so well right now.”

  That cracked them both up. They snorted helplessly through their noses. Sveti doubled over, face in her hands.

  When his own fit eased off, he pulled her hands from her face, and kissed her knuckles. He tasted tears, and licked them away. Every precious, salty, magic drop. By the time he was finished, her eyes were soft and dazzled looking, her lips soft and blurred with shaking.

  “Make love to me,” she whispered.

  Oh, God. Please. He was the flicker of an eyelash away from just jerking his jeans down and falling on her. Taking what was his to take.

  He wrestled that urge right back down into the dark, primordial ooze whence it had come. This was too goddamned important.

  “No,” he said gently. “You should sleep. I’ll watch over you.”

  “I don’t want to sleep, Sam,” she said in a small voice. “He’ll come back. I hate it. I just . . . hate this.”

  “He’s not here,” he said. “He’s just a thought pattern in your mind. Those can change.”

  She snorted. “You make it sound so easy.”

  He just shook his head and twitched the cover over them. “Let’s try a new technique. Go to sleep being worshipped for the spectacular goddess that you are. See if that vibe helps with your nightmares.”

  She giggled. “And just how do you intend to worship me?”

  He smiled at her and started kissing her hands.

  It was a strange revelation, like the one he’d had about her feet. He’d never noticed hands before, but now, hers had suddenly become a shining, beautiful metaphor for her body, her soul. Elegant and well-formed, slender and strong. Her hands broke his heart and blew his mind and made his cock ache. They made tears well into his eyes, too.

  Fortunately, by that point, she was asleep.

  He didn’t stop kissing her hands even then. Let her sleep rocked in a cradle of passionate appreciation. A shield against nightmares. That strange ring Liv had given her looked good on her hand.

  He just wished it was his own ring gleaming there.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sunlight strobed hypnotically through the conifers lining the highway. Sveti stared out of Sam’s car. She was exhausted, in spite of the fact that she’d slept through the night with no Yuri dreams. A fact so startling, she dared not even look at it too closely. She might jinx it.

  Miles and Kev were in the car behind them. Lara, Edie, and little Jon had remained behind up at Cray’s Cove. This was the compromise: an armed escort, a night in Sam’s family home protected by Petrie Investment Industries corporate security staff, and Miles and Kev escorting them to the airport security gates the next day. Sam had proposed the plan this morning at breakfast, and put a blessed end to the awful, grinding fight with Tam, Val, and Nick. Thank God.

  “Your family is not going to be thrilled,” she said. “Bringing me to their home to stay the night without permission?”

  “They’ll hear about it after the fact. My father and sister are in Hong Kong, my grandmother is at the ranch in Wyoming with my sister’s kids. Nobody’s home but the staff. And it’s only one night.”

  Sveti’s smartphone buzzed. It was Bruno, Kev’s adopted brother. She punched the button. “Hey, Bruno.”

  “Yo, Sveti. I’m in your apartment. Lily coached me through clothes and toiletries, but where are your travel documents?”

  She talked him through the gathering of her passport, credit cards, and driver’s license. The deal she’d made involved not going near either her or Sam’s residences, which necessitated that Bruno pack her lingerie, clothes, and makeup for her. Not ideal, but whatever.

  She thanked him and ended the call. “He’s got my suitcase packed,” she said to Sam. “He’s heading to your house.”

  Sam grunted. “I’d rather have him rummaging through my underwear drawer than yours.”

  “You don’t even have an underwear drawer,” she said. “Just boxes. Why is that? Do you not feel at home in that house yet?”

  “I don’t know. Just lazy, I guess.”

  “Like hell you are. Anything you think is worth doing, you do, without hesitation. Even if a bullet through your flesh comes with it.”

  He glanced at her, looking vaguely alarmed. “What’s your point?”

  “No point. Just don’t try to make me underestimate you.”

  “Ah. Well, speaking of bullets through my flesh,” he said. “Rachel told me you came to the ICU to see me, when I got shot last year.”

  Her stomach clenched, as if she’d been caught doing something shameful. “Of course I came to see you. I was worried. Everyone was.”

  “Everybody didn’t come sit with me for nights on end while I was unconscious,” he said. “That was just you, Sveti.”

  She looked at the dense wall of trees. “So? What’s your point?”

  “No point,” he said softly. “Just saying.”

  He tried again after a few minutes. “Is that ring weaponized?”

  “There’s a tiny blade that snaps out of it,” Sveti said. “It doesn’t have poison or explosives or corrosive spray. But it still saved Liv’s life, and Sean and Cindy’s, too. It’s a big deal that Liv gave it to me.”

  “You’re not going to try taking that thing on the plane, are you?”

  “Tam designed it with airline security in mind. Don’t worry.”

  The thick, ornate ring made her hand look so delicate. “Just don’t cut yourself with it,” he muttered.

  They arrived at the Petrie estate as dusk fell. Sveti stared around once they’d been buzzed through the gate, startled speechless. The grounds were amazing, starting from the drive through the forest, then the rolling green hills with white-fenced horse pastures and stables, leading to an enormous home on the hill built to resemble an Irish country manor in a beautifully landscaped garden.

  Sam parked and handed his keys to a middle-aged man in a suit who had come out the door. “Good to see you, Mr. Petrie. Are your friends staying?”

  “No, we’re just the escort,” Kev said, as his window buzzed down. “I’ll be heading right on home, Sam, if you’re good here.”

  “We’re fine now,” Sam said. “Thanks. See you tomorrow.”

  The interior of the house was as impressive as the exterior, but Sam didn’t offer to give her a tour. He had a brief conversation with the staff about dinner, took her hand, and led her up a grand staircase. Another flight, a long corridor, and he opened the door to a large attic room paneled in natural wood. A bank of windows the entire length of the room looked out on the fading cobalt sky and tossing treetops.

  Sveti dropped her bag on a chair as Sam shrugged out of his jacket. She felt weirdly shy in this alien environment. “Val�
��s clothes look good on you,” she ventured. Tam had thrown a fit this morning about Sam’s foul clothes, which resulted in Val’s wardrobe being raided.

  “Goddamn skintight Italian designer crap,” Sam growled, plucking at the shirt that strained over his shoulders. “Didn’t the guy used to be a gigolo or something? He dresses like a Eurotrash fop.”

  “Do not say a word against Val or Tam,” she blurted.

  Sam looked taken aback. “I’m just talking trash about his wardrobe. I’m not judging him personally.”

  “The hell you’re not.” Out of nowhere, her chin was shaking. “Those people are everything to me. They’re all I have in the world.”

  “Jesus, Sveti. I was just bitching about his shirt.”

  “Well, don’t! He did you a favor. It’s unbecoming to complain.”

  She ran for the bathroom and leaned over the sink, splashing her face. Ashamed of herself for being childish and snotty.

  It had just hit her, full force. She’d been too distracted to let herself feel it, overloaded by the attack, the affair with Sam. But she was leaving her beloved family behind. She’d counted on their love and support and fierce protection for so long. What an ungrateful bitch she’d been. And after all her posturing and carrying on, all her whining tantrums about being smothered, the world suddenly seemed so big and fanged and hungry. She hadn’t dared let herself feel scared or vulnerable, as if admitting that she felt it would make it more real.

  It felt real now. She was pathetically glad Sam was going with her. That feeling was so dangerous. That feeling was the drum roll of doom.

  She didn’t dare allow herself to need him like that.

  Sam dredged up some old clothes from the closets while he waited for Sveti to work through her snit. It had been years since he’d spent the night here. There was a limit to how long he could be in his father’s residence without morphing into a snarling animal. Usually, he managed the problem by cutting visits off well before he approached the danger zone.

  Tonight no one was here to torment him, but he still didn’t like the person he became in this house. Barricaded against certain attack. Wary of hidden agendas, subtle traps and decoys. So fucking tense.